Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books
HJ Jackson
Yale University Press £19.95, pp324
Buy it at a discount at BOL
'I have a Trick of writing in the Margins of my Books,' confessed Hester Thrale in 1790. 'It is not a good Trick, but one longs to say something.' Reading is an all-consuming but one-sided conversation, and sometimes readers cannot suppress their delight or dissent. Grabbing a pencil, they punch the blank textual air, scotch errors or send up a flare of fury, an impulsive release that may linger for centuries. HJ Jackson has truffled through catalogues on both sides of the Atlantic to trace a hidden history of reading.
'What pushes a hesitant or reluctant annotator over the brink?' Jackson wonders. Strolling through margins and flyleaves, she discovers delicious nuggets of uncontainable response. When Nabokov reads Kafka's Metamorphosis, the novelist-lepidopterist considers exactly which insect the hero becomes. In Boswell's Life of Johnson, a contemporary adds information about the doctor's mastiff-wrestling days, including his advice: 'Keep your eye steadily fixed on the dog's eye.' Most striking, a reading of Jung prompts TH White to conduct a session of word association in the back of the book.
'Coleridge's marginalia converted me to writing in books,' confides Jackson, a distinguished editor of the poet's work. Annotation, which in the Renaissance forged a virtual community of scholars, became during the eighteenth century a more personal affair. Notes foster companionship, cement a lover's bond, serve revenge or vindication. Coleridge, pining for authorial presence, admits: 'At times, I become restless: for my nature is very social.' He made a digressive art of marginalia: even the term is his, and friends lent him books expressly for annotation. He makes judgments, paces round problems, shares stories.
Discovering an annotated book, you may feel like a polar explorer dismayed that the pristine goal is trodden with footprints. For Jackson, these postcards from the edge of the page aid the biographer and critic, and cement a community of readers across the years. 'Evidence of use,' she insists, 'is less depressing than the signs of a book's having never been read.'
